Today's global economy demands effective worldwide communication. For example, manufacturers often have suppliers located across the country and around the world. Timely and effective communication between the manufacturer and supplier can be critical to business success. In other cases, companies often assign business projects to work groups with members physically located around the world. In some situations, the work group members can belong to different organizations and/or companies. As with manufacturers and suppliers, timely and effective communication can be critical to the success of the work group.
Face-to-face meetings have been the traditional method of communicating, but, with the organizations becoming increasing geographically dispersed, these meetings often require travel on the part of attendees and, thus, are becoming increasingly time and cost prohibitive. With proliferation of computers and the advent of the Internet, and in particular, the maturing of the World Wide Web (“web”), these meetings are increasingly taking place virtually over computer networks through the use of electronic communication technologies, such as web meeting/conferencing and application sharing.
Application sharing technologies enable a sharing user, also referred to as a “presenter,” to share an application with various viewing users, also referred to as “attendees” or “participants.” The display produced by the application that is executing on the presenter's computer, and which is being shared, is made available via a connection, typically through a computer network, to the attendees' computers.
For example, when application sharing, the presenter of the application sharing session sends images of an area on the presenter's computer screen—i.e., the desktop—to all the other attendees in the meeting. The presenter may be able to designate what is to be shared with the attendees by, for example, electing to share the contents displayed on the entire screen, the contents displayed within a “sharing frame,” which is a portion of the screen designated by the presenter using a pointing device such as a mouse, or the contents displayed by an application, typically in an application window. The attendees of the meeting see the shared images reconstructed on their own computers, and are able to see exactly what the presenter is seeing.
When application sharing, the focus of the presenter should be on the application or desktop that is being shared, and not on the online meeting service console. In order to direct the focus to the application or desktop that is being shared, as much screen real estate as possible should be made available—i.e., given over—to the application being shared.
A primary hindrance to allowing the presenter to focus on the application or desktop that is being shared is the UI created by the online meeting service. Conventional online meeting service UIs clutter the presenter's desktop with many application panes. While these panes provide access to online meeting functions, such as, by way of example, instant messaging, attendee roster, meeting status, etc., these panes use up a large portion of the screen real estate, which effectively reduces the screen real estate that is available for use by the application being shared. One solution is for the presenter to “collapse” these panes, but then, the presenter will not have full functionality of the online meeting service console and, moreover, may not know what is occurring in or with the online meeting.
It would be desirable to have a user interface that occupies a reduced amount of real estate on the screen, yet still provides access to the online meeting service functionality in order to enhance the presenter's sharing experience.